David Farland
The King’s Despatcher was a man of few words. He spoke more in soundless gestures and said all that was needed in a sigh or a look. He was old, Dval knew, but he didn’t know how old. He’d had a name once, but seemed to have forgotten it. Yet his mind always seemed to be going, and the Despatcher often lay awake at nights, just pondering.
There was something otherworldly about the man—the way he seemed to smell an ambush on the road ahead, or the time three months back when he was twenty leagues from town and suddenly stopped, mid-stride, and said, “The king needs us.”
Tonight, as they climbed a peak high above the Courts of Tide, the Despatcher seemed to be responding to some sort of alarm. Their route lay straight up the face of the mountain, not by an oft-trod footpath that doubled or tripled its distance with switchbacks, nor even a scant trail made by the horned goats that sprang from crag to pinnacle to browse on spiny grasses. The moon had yet to rise and so they felt their way in darkness, probing outcrops and stone pockets for handholds and toeholds. This was no handicap for Dval, who was born with the night vision of his people, the Woguld.
In his year or so as an apprentice, Dval had learned never to question the King’s Despatcher. Finally, he could not hold his curiosity any longer. Dval touched the Despatcher’s nearest boot, soft-soled for walking silently and climbing. “Master,” he asked, “where are we going?”
For a moment the only sound was wind sighing over rocky ledges. The Despatcher said nothing, then whispered, “Patience,” and crept higher.
Dval wondered. Were they storming some marauder’s hideout, or did the Despatcher just want to get high enough to view a layout of the land? The lights of the Courts of Tide were a muted orange glow, like stars on a dim night.
Perhaps it is only a test of my climbing ability, Dval considered. But he had been born in the mountains and lived in the underworld. He did not fear climbing at night. He inched higher.
At the crest minutes later, a hand reached over a wall of scree to grasp Dval’s, a younger hand than his master’s scarred one. Its grip guided him through the rubble into a hollow a dozen yards across, shallow as a wooden trencher, but rougher. Curved fragments of stone, some as long as his body, lay crumbling against the encircling talus as if swept there. They smelled of ancient decay and Dval wrinkled his nose. Bones. Old bones and egg shells.
Dval froze. This is the nest of wild sea graaks. They will be enraged if they return while we are here. The leather-winged creatures were large enough to grab a man in their jaws and send him over the precipice.
Before he could question his helper, he spotted other dark shapes standing about. All of the men were hooded and robed in black: Despatchers.
His helper flung back his hood and grinned. Surprise surged through Dval once more. This Despatcher couldn’t have been more than five or six years older than his own fifteen years.
“Brooding season is long past,” the young Despatcher said. “The chicks that came from these shells are ancient themselves, if they still live. No graak nests in this aerie now.” Still eyeing Dval, he added, “I call myself Three. I am third in line among all of the king’s Despatchers. Your master is First.” Among Despatchers, this young man seemed gregarious and long-winded.
Dval nodded.
At that moment the moon burst clear of the clouds crowded on the distant horizon, separating the sea from the sky. Its silver face sparkled among the crystal-faceted towers and spires of the Courts of Tide, the castle and city built on the shore of the Carrol Sea. There reigned King Harrill of Mystarria, known as “the Mad” since the death of his queen in a carriage crash two years before.
And there lives his daughter, the Princess Avahn, Dval thought, but quickly banished the longing that welled in his heart. He had saved her from dire wolves once, at the cost of injuries to himself.
The moon’s brilliance outlined the distant peaks of three black Toth ships as well, shaped from stone and teeming with monsters. Dval shuddered at the memories of darkness and stench and snatching hooks inside one obsidian hull. All three ships had been conquered weeks ago.
“Son!” His master’s voice snapped Dval from his waking nightmare. “Come.”
His master joined with two cloaked figures at the aerie’s center, around a simple altar, a low table made of a single carved stone.
In the moon’s glow Dval recognized the others as more of the king’s Despatchers, these middle-aged, and with a hardness in their eyes that spoke of warriors accustomed to killing without a second thought. Dval recognized their faces, but he didn’t know their names any more than he knew his master’s. They were all just Despatchers.
A meeting? he wondered. But who called for it, and when? Dval had not seen another Despatcher since midwinter. Do they always meet here on the midsummer’s full moon?
Dval followed the youth who called himself Three to stand with the other men.
His master stepped back and tipped his head up to search Dval’s face, because Dval stood at least a head taller than all of them. With his white Woguld skin and silvery hair like a smooth waterfall down his back, Dval knew he appeared as pale as a specter in the full moon. He bore the gaze, waiting wordlessly. He is judging me, assessing me for some purpose.
Dval surveyed his master in return. Far older than these others, he knew, by his leathery visage and wrinkle-shrouded eyes. The old Despatcher remained as broad of shoulder as a bull, with thighs as thick as the forest elms, and his hair still gleamed black as a raven’s wing, untouched by the hoarfrost of his years.
At last his master said, “You have proven yourself in the king’s service time and again. I consider you my son, though you are not of my loins. I judge you as ready. But if you are to join the Despatchers in full you must take our oath. That’s why we have revealed to you the ancient circle.” He thrust out his jaw as if pointing and turned his head slowly to trace its boundary.
The rising moon, well above the water now, revealed to Dval what he hadn’t seen before. The broken shells of graaks hatched centuries before camouflaged carved stones set in a perfect ring. The largest, its top shaped to a point, stood in exact alignment with the place from which the moon had risen.
One of his master’s companions stepped forward, a bear of a man. “Do you fully understand the gravity of our duties, boy?”
Dval thought he knew, but the man’s stare filled him with uncertainty. “We are the king’s elite guard,” he said with a shrug.
“In part,” the man said, “but there is more.”
Dval paused to remember what his first teacher, Sergeant Goreich, who trained the king’s guard, had once told him.
“A Despatcher is part scout, part spy, part saboteur, and in need, he may be an assassin,” Dval said. “It is his duty to discover the movements of enemy forces and halt them. He may do this by poisoning their draft horses and the livestock they keep for provisions. He may burn bridges or cause avalanches to block mountain passes to stop their advance. He may be sent to slay enemy kings or to hunt outlaws.”
“Very good.” His questioner gave a scant nod. “But there are deeper things still.”
The fourth man strode forward, strong and wiry. “Our duty is to protect both the king and his people,” he said in a growling voice, like tumbling gravel. “We accept the tasks that no one else dares or can accomplish. You have killed Toth, and that is a deed that few can boast. Yet you must learn to take more difficult actions still, ones that may challenge you in ways beyond your physical strength.”
Dval puckered his brow, questioning what that might mean. What more can I give? he wondered. He had sacrificed pleasure and suffered pains, risked his life a dozen times over now. But these men wanted more from him.
His master must have seen his expression because he said, “More often than not, my son, the greatest dangers to our kingdom arise from within. Sometimes we are called upon to do what men of good conscience cannot.”
Dval thought he understood at last. They want me to give up my conscience? He considered the outlaws he’d met last month in the Kingswood. They were robbers, in tents with their wives. He’d refused to kill the men’s wives, but the Despatcher had shown them no mercy. “I see,” he said uneasily, wondering just how cold he could become.
“When you take this oath,” Three said, “it is not without consequence. It will change you.”
Dval bit his lip, considered. He had lost so much already. Was he willing to give up more? He wondered in his heart if he could keep an oath when he did not know how terribly it might affect him. “I am ready. I will not fail you again.”
“Then place one hand upon your heart, to signify your loyalty to our king and to his people, and the other upon the hilt of your sword, to represent the strength of your arm in their service, and listen with care to each word, for you must repeat them after me. This oath must define you.”
He and the other four men positioned themselves about the stone altar. With them and the moon’s solemn face as his witnesses, Dval vowed to “protect the king and people of Mystarria, whether great or lowly, from all enemies, within and without our land, in whatever form they may take, and to defy the darkness.”
Dval felt somber afterward and wished for time alone to ponder the weight of the words and their deep meanings. But the gravelly-voiced Despatcher said, “Now comes the binding of the oath upon you by the greater powers. Kneel upon the altar.”
Dval dropped to his knees on the aerie’s ragged floor. “Receive the swiftness and the binding of Air,” he said, and blew a deep-chested breath about Dval’s head and shoulders. The breath surrounded him in a whirlwind strong enough to lift and tug his pale hair before it dispersed on the night breeze with a shriek like a falcon’s.
The second drew a flask from beneath his dusky cloak and splashed water upon Dval’s face. “Receive the power and the binding of Water.” Dval knew it was seawater by its scents of salt and kelp and creatures swimming in the deep, scents stronger and sharper than those borne on a summer pond.
Next, his master drew a flaxen cord from the leather pouch at his belt, a cord bearing four runestones the size of Dval’s knuckles, but each a different color and carved with a different shape. He hung the cord about Dval’s neck and said, “Receive the strength and binding of Earth.”
Dval’s knees had begun to ache from kneeling on the rough surface, so he shifted from one to the other to ease their discomfort and noticed something strange. His knees suddenly felt at one with the stone.
“Hold,” ordered Three, and he planted a short-handled torch between the altar’s stones that Dval hadn’t seen him light.
Dval narrowed his sensitive eyes and recoiled from the scorching heat on his face.
“Hold,” Three said again, more firmly this time. He dropped to his own knees across the altar from Dval, and through the fluttering fire Dval saw that the open friendliness in the young man’s face had sunk into a deep sorrow. He said no more but began to stare into Dval’s eyes.
Dval held, despite the torch’s blistering heat and painful brightness. He had felt such heat in the flying sand and dust of the training arena, under the summer sun and stern but fair tutelage of Sergeant Goreich. It is another test, Dval thought. Perhaps their final test. I endured the burning then; I will endure it now for as long as I must.
But the brightness! After a long space Dval realized that the blinding light did not come from the dancing torch, but from the eyes of the young Despatcher. More and more brilliant they burned, as if they held the sun itself within them, the full sun of high summer. Then something twinkled, like a prominent star in a cloudless sky, and released itself in a towering flare.
In that ethereal burst Dval glimpsed a white creature, a man-figure made all of light, brighter than the summer sun, a man of brilliance, of … glory. Dval could find no other word. Yes, he is a Glory!
The Glory pressed forward to peer into Dval’s soul, to search and study it, as if hefting its weight. Dval resisted recoiling once more, not from any heat this time, but from the Glory’s fell scrutiny, its revelation of his every flaw. Dval became sensitive to his own weaknesses: his hatred toward the uncle who had slain his father and banished him from his own people; the anger and disgust he’d felt toward the Mystarrian youths who had tormented him during his training for the king’s guard; and the forbidden warmth—no, heart-hunger—he felt for the Princess Avahn. How it tormented him, so much that even now he wondered how he had bonded to her in such a way. He was not a lover. He could never be that. But at some primal level he needed to protect her.
I see you, the Glory whispered. Let me see all of you. Give yourself to me and I will make you a weapon to drive back the darkness.
His face heated again, to his ears, but the heat came from inside him this time. It was all he could do not to lower his eyes in shame. I’m not worthy. I’m not ready for this at all, and the Glory sees every smudge and smear of it.
It seemed to take all of his courage and strength to remain upright, kneeling above the altar.
A voice filled his burning ears. Not the grave voice of Three but a thunderous voice as of great waters or wind. “I have seen you for what you truly are,” the Glory said. “Receive the purification and binding of Fire and know that your offering of service is accepted.”
There was a flash and light seemed to burn through him, burn all of his evil to ashes, and in an instant he felt an awareness of evil unlike anything he’d imagined. It was all around him. He could feel shadows, sense them miles away, down in the woods, in taverns, and in the Courts of Tide.
The Glory vanished, rising like a meteor that streamed up into the night, and Dval’s last thread of strength left him. He crumpled to the ground beside the altar.
* * *
Dval woke to a familiar hand shaking his shoulder and a crinkled face leaning over him.
“Come now, Son,” the Despatcher said, raising Dval with a hand. “You must eat, and then we will take the easier way down from this mountain and turn our faces toward Toom. There is a matter we must investigate.”
Weakly, Dval rose and peered out across the shimmering seas, silver with morning light, and studied the crystalline bridges like strands of spider web strung between the islands at the Courts of Tide. The Toth’s black ships had moved in the night, changing formation a bit, floating derelicts.
But everything seemed unreal. He could not sense the darkness he’d imagined in the world, and the other Despatchers were gone, had fled like dreams.
Strength returned to Dval after he’d eaten dried meat from his pouch. He still could not stomach many Mystarrian foods, but hunger as fierce as if he’d spent the night in battle drove him to finish a lump of hard cheese and empty his water-skin as well. Lingering shakiness, as he followed his master down a treacherous mountain trail, left him puzzled.
Yet amazement overshadowed his puzzlement. He stared, brow furrowed in contemplation, at the narrow path before him, at the tiny dust clouds raised by his master’s soundless boot-falls. Now I know that Despatchers are more than warriors. They are users of ancient magics, like runelords and wizards.
He fingered the small stones on their cord, hidden beneath his tunic. He did not recognize the runes carved into them, but he could feel potency in them. These are relics of great power. I have been granted great power.
“Master,” he asked, keeping his voice hushed in the early chorus of birdsong, “who is the—no, what is the being I saw last night?”
The Despatcher slid him a slight smile, bearing both deep wisdom and humility. “He is simply called The Master and he has sent you on your first quest.”
Dval nodded toward the north. “To Toom? Are the hill giants crossing the borders again?”
“No,” the Despatcher said. “In the past two months, two young women have been found dead and naked in the lands near Clifftor, where reigns our king’s brother, the Duke Hamid. You must find their killer and avenge them.”
He paused to fix Dval with a cynical gaze. “Here is the mystery: I did not learn of these murders nor receive a command from the king to search into them. Our Master told me of them.”
* * *
As Dval climbed down into the wood, he had to wonder: when had the Master spoken to the Despatcher? Did the man hear words in his mind or just feel impressions?
Could Dval do the same?
They reached their mounts on a road in the morning and Dval made a discovery. As they passed a cottage, the beams of its roof so warped by time and water that it was no more than a hovel, Dval saw a hunchbacked old woman out at her gate, scattering seeds for a few red chickens that peeped in excitement.
There was something wrong with her—terribly wrong. He had to stop and try to figure it out. As he gazed at her, her body seemed to waver like the air above a desert trail and her face became shadowy and misshapen.
He peered at her in amazement and the Despatcher urged him along. “Don’t stare. Our Master has given you new eyes, so that you see the stains on men’s souls.”
There was something disconcerting and hideous about her, and Dval hurried in the Despatcher’s footsteps and wondered, “Is she evil?”
“No more than most,” the Despatcher whispered. “In fact, she’s one of the good ones. All men bear some stains on their souls.”
Dval peered hard at his master, but could sense no darkness or stains there, nor in himself.
“Where are my stains?” Dval wondered.
“Our Master burned them away,” the Despatcher said. “Last night. But take care, or they shall return.”
And so they strode that day to an inn, where a kindly fat innkeeper offered a horse, and, as Dval neared the man, he not only saw the flickering shadows of corruption, but he could smell it upon the man—putrefaction, like rotting meat—and it was all that he could do to remain calm when the man shook his hand at the wrist.
Dval caught the Despatcher watching him with an amused gleam in his dark eyes, and, as they rode down the highways, Dval peered keenly at men, struggling not to see just their forms, but to really view them. He wanted to feel them, to know them.
“Study others carefully,” the Despatcher warned that night. “Learn to truly see them. Listen for warnings. The harder you peer, the better you will learn to truly see. But if you grow careless, your vision will grow dimmer and dimmer and leave you altogether.”
So they traveled by horseback, and when they reached villages Dval struggled to see men truly, to see through their stains and twisting shadows, and he began to realize why the Despatchers often sought solitude in the wastes, for just being near others drained him, left him feeling mentally and emotionally exhausted. For eleven days they rode.
On their last night, with the towers of the duke’s castle distantly visible above the forest, they entered an inn whose sign bore a very fat hog wallowing among brightly painted squashes and melons. The sign swung on the evening breeze, creaking above their heads as the Despatcher pushed the timber door open.
While they devoured a savory pork stew, Dval listened to his master talk with the innkeeper, a woman as rotund as the pig on her sign. Like most people of Mystarria, she repeatedly darted wary glances at Dval and his white Woguld features. In the comfortable near-dark, where he didn’t have to squint, he met her silent queries with his steady gaze. He could see almost no stain on this woman’s soul.
His master finally seemed to become irritated by Dval’s silence and turned to him. “It’s your quest boy. Seek to know what you need to know.”
So Dval looked hard at the woman, searching her face, and felt … light inside of her.
“Two young women have died this summer,” Dval told her. “I must find their killer. Is there anything you can tell me about it?”
The matron’s face clouded over and tears glistened in her eyes. “The first girl was from our village. Fair Meaghan, daughter of the beekeeper.” She shook her head in genuine sorrow. “She’d taken pots of honey to the market at the castle, but she never returned. The other came from Cliff Haven, a fishers’ village three miles up the coast. Both girls were found in the woods not far from here, naked and strangled, by the bruises on their necks, and probably ravished.”
Dval shifted in the heavy chair. “Why were they naked?”
There was a clatter across the room as a patron spilled ale on the floor.
The innkeeper blinked and studied him. “When pirates take a man, young Despatcher, they strip him to his skin before they lock him in chains and sail away with him to Haversind. It keeps them from hiding weapons or breaking free. We lose a lot of poor folk to them every year—Pirates from Haversind.”
Slavers! Dval thought. He searched his heart. Yes, he felt a brooding darkness to the north and east, out at sea. It was like a massive storm on the horizon, with gray swirling clouds. Pirate marauders were indeed involved somehow, he felt sure.
“Thank you, mistress,” the Despatcher said, “for this good meal, this night’s lodging, and for your help.” He placed two steel coins on the trestle table.
The next morning, as they rode easily toward the castle, Dval spoke from under his deep, black hood. “Do we need to even go to the Duke’s court? The pirates … I can sense darkness. I feel them, a cloud off to the north.”
“Very good,” the Despatcher said. “Our master is guiding you there. Learn to trust those feelings.”
The castle was bustling when they reached it that morning, cocks crowing, bread baking, crowds gathering at the markets. Duke Hamid’s man-at-arms stopped them at the castle gate, then admitted them into his great hall, announcing, “Two Despatchers from the courts of His Royal Highness King Harrill!”
From within the cowl of his robes, Dval peered about. The great hall was much smaller than the king’s, but the stonework was exceedingly fine. High windows allowed the morning light to shine upon deep-blue tapestries that displayed saber-cats clawing the air.
The duke rose from his humble wooden throne, a broad smile lighting his face, though he didn’t conceal his revulsion quickly enough when Dval dropped his cloak’s hood. Dval could imagine him thinking, “The Gross Wurm,” the epithet he’d heard so often from the king.
“Welcome to the Court of Clifftor,” Duke Hamid said in a voice that was surprisingly jovial. “Twice welcome, indeed! May I ask what brought you? Was it my mad brother that sent you, or do you come on other business?”
The Despatcher peered curiously at the Duke, as if considering how to answer. Dval felt a deep reluctance to speak, and he peered hard into the Duke, saw a curious darkness, but to Dval’s surprise, the Despatcher said openly, “Other business. There have been murders in your land. Two young women …”
The Duke’s smile faltered and he whispered worriedly, “Yes, I have heard. Please, come feast with us tonight, and let us discuss … in private, how to capture the men that did this.”
Dval studied the man. Ten years younger than King Harrill, Dval guessed, with hair more blond than the king’s sandy color. But Hamid shared his brother’s hazel eyes, keen and searching, his facial structure, and brawny build. He is a runelord, my master said, with a dozen endowments of brawn, sight, and agility, the gifts most sought by warriors.
Dval tried again to reach out, to sense the shadow on the man’s soul, and he felt stains there, but his heart urged him northward, toward the darkness.
“We understand that the killers might be pirates?” Dval offered.
“Perhaps,” the Duke agreed, “but I’m hesitant to put the blame on the most obvious malefactors. Sometimes, there is more to a matter than it seems. Let us investigate this more deeply.”
That evening the Lady Etelinda, Duchess of Clifftor, joined her husband at dinner. Dark as he was fair, with hair of rich mahogany, full lips, and brown eyes that sparkled with warmth and intelligence and humor, she alone of the court did not flinch at her first sighting of Dval. She extended a slender hand to him in welcome. I like her better than her husband, he thought, and touched her hand lightly with his lips in the manner his master had taught him.
He reached out with his mind again and sensed warmth from her, and light. Or was he just imagining it?
Seated several places along the head table from the duke, between his master and a knight presented to them as Sir Marin, Dval consumed the rare flank of beef with gratitude but could only pick at most of the feast. Many of the colorful vegetable dishes would have sickened him; even their aromas twisted his stomach.
The hearth behind them was banked low that night, and hunting hounds lay beside it, yawning and waiting for bones.
Sir Marin, a middle-aged knight, inquired in a tone more amiable than Dval had expected, “I hear that you’ve come to investigate the murders? The Duke has placed me in charge of the matter. How can I help?”
For the next few minutes he divulged a few details of the victims, telling how they had been found, and where. He peered at them and then quickly glanced down to his food. Slipping a sidelong glance at Dval, he murmured with sincerity, “I wish you well in searching out this horror.”
Dval glanced to the Despatcher for his reaction, but his master remained silent.
Should I push for more? Dval wondered. But he felt sure that this was not the time or place.
Search for the darkness, Dval thought, and he tried to reach out with his mind. He felt it here, in the room, but it sought to conceal itself. He felt it to the north and east, in the isles of Haversind. And he sensed a great darkness still farther to the east—the monstrous Toth.
We live in a world filled with more dangers than we know.
He felt quite unsettled. He looked again to his master and the Despatcher nodded ever so slightly.
After dinner, the duke’s chamberlain greeted the Despatcher and Dval graciously outside the high double doors when they left the feast hall. “Rooms have been prepared for you. If you will come with me.”
Dval stepped to follow, imagining with relish a feather bed up off the stone floor, not a tick filled with scratchy straw and fleas and the stale sweat of previous sleepers.
His master stopped him with a firm grip on his shoulder. “We are truly thankful for your lord’s kindness,” he told the chamberlain, “but we must be on the hunt tonight.”
“Oh?” The chamberlain arched dark eyebrows.
“We are investigating the deaths of the two young women,” the Despatcher said.
“Oh,” the chamberlain repeated, not as a question this time. To Dval’s curiosity, he leaned nearer to them, peered gravely from one to the other, and whispered, “Blessings upon you in your search.”
* * *
The Despatcher headed north into the wilderness, as if to challenge the darkness. In two more days’ travel they pressed through some deep redwood forests and then climbed some rolling hills to reach a giants’ village on the border of Toom. The village had no houses or inns, merely a cluster of thirty or forty brutish lean-tos made of gray stone slabs on the leeward side of a large hill. The stones were splotched with lichens in shades of metallic green, gold, and crimson. Sheep and donkeys grazed the rolling slopes beyond, on rich grassland spotted with stands of wild apple trees and natural hedges of blackberry.
“Hill giants live there,” his master had told him the day before. “You have met one of them, Sir Bandolan.”
“Yes.” Dval had met one. On the hillside where the queen’s carriage had crashed, when he had been accused of it, the giant had pinned him to the soil with a massive foot, nearly cracking his ribs. Hours later they had fought a Toth queen together and Sir Bandolan had pulled him out from under its massive carcass after he felled it.
“Our king,” his master said, “employs dozens of them in his armies as mercenaries, mainly up here in the north. We are seeking Bandolan’s brother, Dalmodir. He is a sage, of sort—a master at sensing the shadows that surround us and battling them.”
They found him in late afternoon, apart from the village, seated in a shelter at the edge of the forest and carving intricate patterns into the six-inch wings of his massive bow. His blade seemed too small for such great hands, but he wielded it deftly. In the summer’s heat he wore only a kilt of gray-brown donkey hide. Colorful stones tied into his full beard clicked softly together when he lifted his head.
Runestones like the ones my master gave me? Dval wondered. Very different from the rat skulls woven into Sir Bandolan’s beard.
Dval felt no darkness in the giant, only a soft burning glow, as if he held a hidden fire.
Dalmodir assessed them through coal-black eyes from beneath his craggy brow. He was as silent as a Despatcher himself. He slapped the flattened turf before him in an invitation to sit, with a hand that could have spanned Dval’s chest.
The giants of Toom could not speak like normal men. Some oddness forced them to speak in rhyme, aside from the odd exclamation. Once Dval explained what he sought, Dalmodir’s eyes flashed in anger and his voice grumbled like a thunderhead approaching over the mountains:
“Welcome, welcome, have no fear,
Though one must beware
Of all out here.
Though pirates roam,
The woods are home
To things of darker nature still.”
Dval wondered what would be darker than the pirates’ hearts. Magic, he decided. He had heard stories of spirits in these woods, malevolent creatures summoned by sorcerers. He shivered where he squatted at the thought of pirates dealing in the ancient arts. Maybe there are other creatures, too. Maybe even a Toth sorceress.
At times, the past few days, Dval had thought that he could sense unseen … essences, spirits.
Dalmodir cast him a critical stare as if sifting his thoughts, but Dval held his tongue. The giant said, “Hmph,” applied his knife to his bow once more, and rumbled what seemed to Dval to be a mournful song.
“Two maidens died not in one night
But each when the moon gave its fullest light,
After it grew wan and dim
And waxed to fullness once again.”
The girls were killed a month apart, under the full moon, Dval realized. The moon is waxing again. There could be a third murder in another two weeks. He shot a glance at his master.
“Where do the pirates land?” Dval wondered.
Dalmodir did not glance at either of them, but rumbled:
“Search for tumbled rocks and trees
Where cliffs cast brooding shadows upon the seas.”
The Despatcher bowed in gratitude and pushed himself to his feet. “We have a night’s work to do,” he told Dval, and started eastward.
Yes, Dval thought. I can sense the darkness there. He felt eager to greet it. He fell silent as they rode through fen and wood, where gray squirrels barked warnings from trees and jays ratcheted.
Four or so miles on, the crash of heavy surf reached Dval’s ears. In another mile, brine and fish scented the air, stronger than in the graaks’ abandoned aerie, and the pastureland dropped off the edge of a cliff more than one hundred feet high.
They skirted along the coastline for some distance, peering over often while the sun sank gradually behind them, until they came upon a cove where a section of cliff had fallen away. In the deepening blue at its foot, Dval distinguished tumbled boulders and windswept pines stretching for the sky. “There,” he told his master.
There was a beach in the inlet, a tiny spit of sand where there had not been one for miles. Dval recognized that of course it could serve as a natural harbor, where none other existed around here.
His master nodded approvingly.
Even bearing all his weapons, including his sword and warhammer, Dval found this descent easier than his midnight climb weeks earlier. He led the way in the darkness and found cover behind mounded rocks at one side of the crescent-shaped beach.
He could sense a rising darkness out over the sea, even though he could not see it.
The moon rose, half full, and climbed. It passed beyond the cliff’s top, darkening their ambush still more. Finally, through the shush of waves spilling up the sand, came a lap of oars and muffled voices. Two boats appeared from the gloom, visible at first only by a torch held aloft in each.
Voices fell silent before their owners slipped over the gunwales, scarcely disturbing the water, to haul the boats to shore. Dval heard the paff, paff of feet, the hiss of keels on wet sand, and counted the black-clad shapes. Eighteen, counting the torchbearers.
His master touched Dval’s arm for his attention and shaped soundless directives with his hands: “Cut them off from their boats. Torchbearers first, then kill them all.”
All? By myself? Dval considered how to do it. Sneak up and kill the torchbearers first, leaving the narrow inlet in darkness, and then take the men. If this was a test, it would not be a hard one, he decided. With his night vision, he did not need torches to defend himself, but his victims would.
Dval answered with a curt nod, nocked an arrow to his bow, held a second in his teeth, and rose like a shadow from his cover. The first torchbearer flew backward with an arrow through his throat, blocking any outcry. Wet sand doused his flame and his counterpart whirled. Dval glimpsed the whites of wide eyes a heartbeat before his second arrow pierced the man.
A shout rose as blackness swallowed the cove. Night-blind, the pirates drew swords, staggered into one another. Dval traded bow for longsword and danced in among them, slashing and lunging. Most felt the swift tip of his blade at their throats, but two he shoved hard, impaling them on their mates’ swinging swords. The tide, already receding, couldn’t reach all the splattered stains, like iron-scented ink, to sweep them from the pale sand.
Dval executed them in moments and stood with heart hammering, staring at their corpses. He’d had to kill men before, but never in such numbers.
He felt for the darkness and found that its source was gone.
As Dval retrieved his arrows, then cleaned his blade and the arrow points, the Despatcher leapt down from the rocks onto the beach and said, “A good night’s work, that, but I fear our task is not yet finished.”
Dval weighed his master’s words and knew that he had done something wrong. He’d been sent here as a test and he had failed it somehow, or only partly succeeded.
* * *
For days Dval and the Despatcher stayed in a small village, both of them awaiting some unheard signal. Then one day, Dval woke and knew it was time to head south. Three days later, Dval and his master stood in Duke Hamid’s audience chamber. The air was fresh with the scent of mock-orange blossoms strewn upon the floor and the Duke seemed to be in good cheer.
“We have slain the pirates who ravaged your northern coasts, my lord,” the Despatcher announced. “There will be no more maidens stolen from your lands.”
As proof, the Despatcher threw down a bag filled with the dead pirates’ rotting ears.
Duke Hamid smiled, smugly Dval thought. He noted the gleam in the man’s eyes when he said, “I am forever grateful for the assistance of my brother the king’s Despatchers. Let me reward you. We shall feast!”
The Despatcher only bowed courteously. “Alas, we cannot. We have far to go this night. Our king still fears that more Toth might beach this summer and so we must refuse your graciousness. It is time for us to turn south to the Courts of Tide.”
“At least let me reward you,” the Duke suggested. “I’ll give you some fine horses to help hurry you on your way, and silver so that you might dine at the finest inns. The Stag and Brew is sixteen miles down the highway, but with good horses you could easily make it by nightfall.”
Dval hoped their job done and felt happy with his reward. But six miles down the road from the castle, the Despatcher cautiously guided his horse and palfrey into the trees, into the duke’s private hunting reserve, and began to circle back toward the northeast. No village stood within the preserve’s wooded boundaries, Dval knew. No place of refuge for fleeing prey, when the moon rose to its full. Only groves of scrub oak and pine, interspersed with barren fields of wheat burned white by the summer sun.
To Dval’s surprise, as they reached a grove of pines, the giant Dalmodir met them in the bracken, beside a track made by the regular passage of many horses. At eight feet tall, he had to duck and stand between the lowest branches beneath the pines. He greeted them with an incline of his head, swung his warclub off his shoulder, peered about, grunted as if he had just made a discovery, and said:
“Behold the dark and awful place
Where the damsels’ hunters love to race.”
Dval wondered. There is no way that the giant could have communicated with the Despatcher. Not a word, not a note. Yet the Despatcher did not seem at all surprised.
They serve the same master, Dval realized, to his embarrassment, and they have been summoned here. Yet I did not hear the call!
Something inside him broke and he let out a whimper, resolving to listen harder, to learn to hear his true Master’s voice.
Then he felt it—bloodstains on the ground all around him. The blood seemed to rise up like screams that chilled his spine and made him tremble. He felt the killing field.
Dval and his master dismounted and tied their horses in dense growths of oak a hundred yards away. Then they and the giant hunkered down on a hillock overlooking the forest to wait for nightfall.
Shortly after the setting of the sun, the moon rose bright and full, though it was bloody red from the cooking fires of a port city to the east.
They did not have to wait more than two hours past sunset.
Dval heard the girl’s voice first, rising from the plains in the far distance, perhaps a mile away. Most likely, his master was not quite aware of it, for humans did not hear well.
Dval heard shrieks high with indignity and fear, but not panic. No gibbering or blubbering; she still had wit enough to protest her capture, to demand, “Let me go! What crime have I committed?”
The roar of a man’s laughter gave answer, vicious and unmistakably drunken. “Your crime, my bird?” he slurred. “Is beauty now a crime? No, unless it be flaunting your beauty in the market. … Yes.” Another deep chuckle rolled forth. “That is your crime, and fanning to flames my hunger for it. … Such piracy! For that you must pay me by satisfying my hunger when I catch you at the end of the chase.”
Shock stiffened Dval where he stood. It was the duke’s voice! But he is a runelord. He has sworn fealty to his people, to use his endowments to protect them, not destroy. By such deeds as this he breaks his oaths.
“My lord, do not this thing,” the unseen girl cried. “I beg of you by all that’s worthy!”
Once again raucous laughter echoed among the trees. He heard the muted plod of hooves on loam and the duke shouted, “Strip her and release her! Hold fast the dogs.”
The girl screamed again, still unseen at this distance. But soon, orange torchlight appeared, dancing between trunks black as cinders. The torches halted and wavered on a gust. Dval heard cloth ripping and the girl’s gasps and cries, outraged as much as frightened, and more chuckles at her distress.
Jaw and fists clenched, he questioned his master and the giant with a glance.
The Despatcher gestured toward the track below. “Wait for the maiden there,” he murmured. “We will see to this duke.”
When Dalmodir nodded agreement, Dval sprang away and raced down among the trees. He ran fleet-footed and silently for two minutes, scaring up a pair of stags that had been grazing in the grass.
He reached the trail. A limbless hulk of a long-dead oak leaned low over the track, forcing it to curve. His soft boots trod fallen leaves and twigs without a sound as he melded with the shadows of its hollow bole.
On a thought, he released his cloak’s clasp at his throat, his long cloak with its deep hood, sewn by Sergeant Goreich’s wife to protect his white skin from the sun. It was black as night and offered perfect concealment, turning its wearer into a shadow. I have no need of it here, he thought, but this girl does.
Her panting sobs reached his ears before he heard the hurried pats of her bare feet on the forest floor. The full moon’s glow made a ghost of her in the blue-black night, running on long legs with her arms crossed over her breasts and her loosed hair rippling behind.
A shout sounded from the direction that she’d come and she cast a swift glance backward. Moonlight glistened silver from tears that streaked her face, but Dval saw determination in the set of her fine chin and the way her eyes searched the forest.
As she drew even with him, he sprang, cloak stretched out like the sail of a small ship in a fair wind, and wrapped it snugly about her. She cried out, a startled sound muffled by the cloak, and thrust an elbow into Dval’s chest hard enough to take his breath. He gasped, but kept his hold. “Hush!” he hissed at her ear, and pulled her into the dead tree’s shadow. “I came to help you. Watch.”
A horse appeared up the track, mincing ahead of the men who bore the torches and restrained the wolfhounds on their taut leashes. Ears flicking every direction, it snorted through extended nostrils and advanced in small jumps. When it drew near enough that Dval could see the whites of its rolling eyes and the drunken leer of its rider, the girl shuddered against him.
Something man-sized hurtled from the undergrowth at the horse’s feet, spinning a cloak in its face. The beast reared onto its hind legs with a squeal and thrashed the air with its forehooves. The duke somersaulted from his saddle, arms and legs flailing. He struck the turf hard on his back as his mount wheeled and lunged toward the castle, sending the men on foot sprawling. Dval heard the crash of underbrush and the yip of a kicked dog as the torch went out.
The bulky form in the dirt before him stirred and groaned. Dalmodir, club resting on his shoulder once more, stepped into the moonlight to join the Despatcher, who had approval emanating from his deep-set eyes.
The Despatcher motioned to Dval. “Remember the oath that you swore on the mountain.”
And Dval suddenly understood his true test.
The words his master had spoken there rose clearly in his mind: “More often than not, my son, the greatest dangers to our kingdom arise from within. Sometimes we are called upon to do what men of good conscience cannot.”
After them echoed his own words, spoken with his hands on his heart and his sword. “To protect the king and every person of Mystarria, whether great or lowly, from all enemies, within and without our land, in whatever form they may take, and to stand against the darkness.”
Sometimes, Dval thought, our duty is to protect the people from their lords. He glanced at the girl, huddled in his cloak at his shoulder, and queried his master with his eyes.
“A petty, ignoble execution for an ignoble man,” the Despatcher said.
Dval peered down at the Duke. There was a deep shadow in him, revolting and twisted. He had not seen it before and he realized something. The Duke was drunk, a cruel and dangerous drunk, and under its influence, it seemed that he had become a new creature, more foul and loathsome than a pirate.
Dval sank to his knees beside the duke. The man was so drunk that he now simply moaned in a fitful sleep, tossing his head from side to side.
My Master, the Glory, has been leading me here all along, knowing what we must do. Dval had worried that he himself might be an oathbreaker, but now he had an opportunity to prove himself.
A scuff and a rustle wrenched his attention upwards. The duke’s men stood rigid mere yards away, Sir Marin’s face as pale as the moon itself, as if he feared for his own life.
The Despatcher stood at Dval’s back. “You will tell them,” the Despatcher ordered, “that the duke died in a fall from his horse.” Every word carried its own warning and Dval knew that his master’s eyes, leveled on each of the men in turn, reinforced his threat.
None of them replied. The Despatcher nodded to Dval.
Dval studied Sir Marin and the men and thought he saw relief hidden beneath their fear. Like him, they were mere servants, following orders.
The duke stirred again and stared at Dval, eyes glazed with drink but wide with sudden fear.
“Oathbreaker,” Dval whispered, and snapped his neck.